Cristobal DeLeon says he instantly recognized the man who robbed his East Oak Cliff convenience store at gunpoint this summer. Patrol officers responded to his 911 call and a detective was soon provided with a name, photo and possible address for the suspect.

But it took several weeks for detectives in the department’s robbery unit to sit down and interview DeLeon — a basic step toward solving the case. In the meantime, the same suspect allegedly kidnapped two women and raped one before selling her to a pimp.

Stagnant investigations such as DeLeon’s robbery are a symptom of severe understaffing of the department’s detective units, current and former Dallas officers say. The number of detectives in units that investigate the bulk of the city’s most violent crimes — such as murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — has been slashed by 46 percent since 2010, according to a review by The Dallas Morning News.

Where about 91 investigators once worked these cases, about 49 are now on the job.

“How can you justify taking away so many detectives?” said Laura Penrod, who retired from the assault unit last year. “It’s a danger to society.”

Police commanders defended the reductions, noting that the department is on pace to report the 11th consecutive year of declining violent crime, so fewer detectives are needed.

“We made strategic decisions to focus our staffing model on police visibility in Dallas neighborhoods,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown said Friday in a written response to questions from The News. “Our staffing model decisions require investigative efficiency — doing more with less.”

Before declining a request for an extensive interview, Brown said during a brief phone call earlier in the week, “It’s just so dramatic … Just half the murders that we used to work. The last nine years there’s been a dramatic drop in aggravated assaults, in sexual assaults. It’s fallen off the cliff. To say we don’t have staffing is just the opposite of what we’re seeing.”

But The Dallas Morning News has reported in a series of stories that first began to appear in 2009 that the police department has changed the way some crimes are counted, sometimes in violation of FBI guidelines, with the result that comparisons of crime statistics across the years would be inaccurate.

Violent crimes reported to the FBI fell 51 percent between 2002 and the end of 2011. All crime reported to the FBI fell 37.4 percent between 2002 and the end of 2011.

But by another measure, actual crime appears to be higher. Arrests for a certain category of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault reported on the department’s monthly enforcement activity report violent rose 2 percent between 2002 and the end of 2011. Total arrests for all crimes are 15.8 percent higher. More arrests indicates a greater workload for detectives.

Caseloads for detectives investigating murders, robberies and sexual assaults appear to be higher in Dallas than for comparable detectives in Fort Worth and Austin. Based on actual crimes reported to the FBI in 2011, where a Dallas detective might today handle in excess of 400 robberies in a year, a Fort Worth detective would handle about 115 and an Austin detective about 85.

And policing experts and detectives also say modern investigative processes are far more time-consuming and detailed than in the past because of advances in technology and legal standards. The Police Department noted that with violent crimes, 32.3 percent were cleared in 2002, while 37.7 percent were cleared in 2011.

The News’ months-long investigation, which included interviews with current and former members of investigative units and the scouring of hundreds of documents obtained through state open-records laws, reveals that the units have been stripped of manpower as detectives were transferred, quit or retired. The News found that since Brown assumed command in 2010:

The number of detectives investigating robberies has fallen by 62 percent. But comparing the first nine months of 2010 vs. 2012, robberies fell 12 percent.

The homicide unit’s staffing is down 42 percent from 26 to 15 detectives. Murders in Dallas have declined 3.5 percent in the comparable period. Dallas has 15 homicide detectives, while Austin has 12.

The cold case unit, which investigated old, unsolved murders, died without fanfare as its four detectives retired one by one.

The sexual assault unit has dropped from seven detectives to four. A 2004 efficiency study recommended the unit be beefed up to nine detectives because it was dramatically understaffed when compared to peer departments.

In some cases, the drastic cuts may have contributed to more violence as suspected criminals remained free while cases languished.

The sluggish response to DeLeon’s holdup came days after the number of detectives working robberies was slashed by more than half. The downtown robbery unit was awash in cases.

Cases piling up

The fifth floor of the Jack Evans Police Headquarters once bustled with detectives working their murders, rapes, robberies and assaults. These days, plenty of desks sit empty. The remaining detectives struggle to keep up with the caseloads.

“I’m getting five or six cases a day,” said one detective who investigates violent criminal offenses. Like all of the active-duty investigators interviewed for this story, the officer asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation by department commanders.

The detective described a typical caseload of about 35 to 45 a month where he once had 25 to 30.

“When you have something that’s kind of a hot case and you’re out there being a real detective, everything else just sort of stacks up,” said the detective. “There’s no way to make it work.”

As the number of detectives has declined, the Dallas robbery unit has been hardest hit.

Larry Lewis, a longtime homicide sergeant who retired in October from the unit that investigates officer-involved shootings, said the attitude of senior commanders is that as detectives leave, the investigative units can reorganize remaining staff to cover the workload.

“I get sick and tired of that,” Lewis said. “Reorganize with what?”

An extreme example came in July, when to take pressure off understaffed investigative units at the city’s patrol stations, the department centralized robbery investigations downtown. Where 26 detectives once handled robberies, 10 now do the work. On average, each detective’s caseload more than doubled.

Fort Worth has 11 detectives assigned to its robbery unit. Austin has 13. Both cities had fewer robberies than Dallas last year: Austin had 1,106 robberies, Fort Worth 1,267 and Dallas reported 4,066.

In Dallas, one detective handles robberies with no leads, largely making cursory phone calls to victims. Nine other detectives average about one-and-a-half to two new cases each day.

Robert Doran, a former Chicago-area police commander who teaches law enforcement agencies about how to properly staff investigative units, says that’s too many cases because investigating robbery is time-consuming work. For example, hours of interviews and forensic examinations of videos can be necessary.

Robbers also typically keep doing it until they’re caught, so if investigators don’t have time to sufficiently investigate cases, then “the robber is out there and is going to re-offend,” Doran said.

Austin police Lt. Michael Eveleth runs his city’s robbery unit. “People will realize it if they’re getting away with it,” he said. “The quicker you can catch them, the fewer violent crimes you will have.”

The Dallas Police Department has found more manpower for other areas.

A social media outreach position was created. Nine sworn officers were recently dedicated full-time to the department’s Police Athletic League outreach efforts. At least 15 patrol officers were dedicated to a job enrichment program that rotates officers in and out of different positions for career development purposes.

The department also sent 24 officers who are restricted to light duty and 25 newly promoted senior corporals to help answer 911 calls in its beleaguered emergency communications center. And this year, the department created a 20-plus member task force to target fencing operations.

Investigative units have been sapped in other ways, too. Many civilian employees who performed tasks such as answering phones and filing paperwork lost their jobs in years of thin budgets. Sworn officers have had to pick up the slack.

But the decline in the investigative ranks appears to have had little to do with budgets.

Beginning around 2007, the Dallas City Council began beefing up the size of the department. The sworn police force grew steadily from about 2,900 in 2004 to about 3,640 in 2010. Budget cuts have slowed the pace of hiring in recent years, but the department still numbers about 3,500.

Brown has said numerous times that beefing up patrol officers on the streets is a higher priority. He told City Council members last year that 66 percent of all officers worked in patrol and that he wanted to increase that to 70 percent.

Crushing workloads

The department has recently authorized the hiring of two homicide and two robbery detectives. But as workloads increase, detectives who have enough years of service to retire appear to be retiring more often, exacerbating the downward spiral. Others choose to leave their high-profile jobs, such as the homicide detective who recently announced he’d rather return to patrol.

Hiring is also under way for two more sexual assault detectives, but one detective is planning to retire in January, another is expected to retire in the summer, and two others are likely to be promoted out of the unit next year. Since the unit has only four detectives, the entire staff could be turned over within a year.

“For a city the size of Dallas, do you really think that four detectives is enough?” said rape survivor and victims advocate Courtney Underwood Newsome. She said she believes Brown is committed to properly staffing the unit, but, “it’s especially important that we have the manpower to move these sensitive cases forward quickly and get these offenders behind bars.”

Timothy Gargani, a former assaults sergeant, said a major factor in his decision to retire in April was the overwhelming workload.

“It’s going to come to a point where something’s got to give and something’s going to be overlooked,” Gargani said. “If you have a higher caseload, you’re going to shorten your investigative time on every case to try to keep ahead.”

That appears to have been the situation in the Ryan Lusk case.

Lusk, 24, is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot during a Greenville Avenue robbery over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

One of the men accused of robbing him had been released from jail earlier this year because a Dallas detective didn’t make the deadline for filing an aggravated robbery case against him in a January robbery.

“Everyone makes mistakes in their jobs, but sometimes a mistake is going to be more costly,” said Lusk’s mother, Paula Montoya.

The department has said that the detective miscalculated his paperwork deadline, but during the 10 business days that he had to file his case, the detective was dealing with a total of 10 new cases. One of those cases involved the severe beating of an elderly man where a whole day was spent interviewing the suspect and witnesses.

Austin’s robbery detectives handle seven to eight cases a month.

Doran, the expert on staffing investigative units, says departments need to take a “reasoned approach” that looks at more than average caseloads, such as how many hours it takes to handle cases that resulted in an arrest.

“If they don’t adequately staff the investigations units,” Doran said, “then there is a good possibility that either they will not be able to investigate cases that have investigative potential because they run out of time, or they’ll be investigating a lot of cases but not putting sufficient time into any one of those cases.”

Current and former detectives interviewed by The News said they understand that some staffing cuts might be necessary, but, like Lewis, the homicide sergeant who retired in October, they argue that reductions should take into account caseloads and the time it takes to work different types of cases.

Without enough detectives to adequately investigate cases, they say they fear more situations where violent criminals remain free to commit more horrific crimes.

“If we don’t have time to identify a suspect and make an arrest, then that guy has time to go out and commit more crimes, putting more citizens in danger,” said one detective.

Patrol rotations

Brown has also placed heavy emphasis on rotations that put detectives and other officers who don’t regularly work in patrol back on the streets for four weeks of every year.

“Eighty-eight percent of crime in Dallas is property crime,” Brown told City Council members last September. “It happens in neighborhoods, predominantly in the daytime, and so our visibility and our interactions have the greatest impact on preventing these types of crimes.”

Brown said the department tried to have a minimal impact on those officers in the rotations “because they have work continuing to come to their desk … particularly in the investigative units. It’s important that they investigate those crimes in a timely manner and so what we do is we monitor how people are rotating and make sure we have an adequate staff there.”

While some officers have enjoyed the change of pace, many investigators have found the rotations increasingly disruptive since they began in August 2011.

“Everything is geared toward patrol, and that’s fine,” said Lewis, the retired homicide sergeant. “They’re making some good arrests, but what they don’t understand is that it’s the detectives that put that package together. If the guy doesn’t get convicted in court and doesn’t get a lengthy sentence, then what is all that effort for?”

On an unusual week in August, the unit that investigates officer-involved shootings was down to three detectives as it was flooded with more than 10 cases of assault on a peace officer. A fourth detective was on a two-week patrol rotation. The unit’s fifth detective had recently retired.

“It’s almost like they have completely forgotten about us,” said one detective who investigates violent crimes. “Why even send us out on patrol? Leave us in our jobs and let us do our work.”

Edward Maguire, an American University criminologist who has studied police staffing issues, questions the value of patrol rotations, saying that generic across-the-board approaches often don’t work as well as using investigative resources to target high-rate offenders.

“This idea of taking people out of investigative units and putting them on the streets in … anything less than extreme circumstances is extremely disruptive to the operation of the agency, and the costs are probably going to be incurred by victims and others,” he said.

Thinking ‘What if?’

DeLeon, the convenience store owner, says he struggled for days to reach the detective assigned to his case after a robber came in through a rear door of his tiny Beckley Avenue store on the night of July 17. The man whom he identified as Cruz Alcala, 19, grabbed money from the cash register and fled.

An interview with DeLeon was finally scheduled, but the meeting was cancelled because police didn’t have a Spanish-speaking detective available.

Police rescheduled for the following day, but that meeting was cancelled, apparently because nearly a week after the holdup of his convenience store, Alcala allegedly kidnapped two women, raping one. Police launched a massive manhunt for Alcala.

“If they had done something, this other thing wouldn’t have happened,” said DeLeon.

Alcala is in the Dallas County jail held on the charges related to the kidnappings. But DeLeon was robbed again on Oct. 13. A gunman took $1,000 and his phone before fleeing.

A few days later, the detective who handles offenses that don’t have any leads noted that he had called DeLeon but that he was not able to talk to him because of a language barrier.

“There are currently no Spanish-speaking detectives assigned to the robbery unit,” the detective wrote. He noted that an attempt would be made to have a Spanish-speaking detective from elsewhere in the department contact DeLeon and added, “This offense will be suspended pending contact with the complainant.”

DeLeon was told that a detective might be able to get back with him in early November.

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